The Poet

I am being generous by giving this movie a 4 out of 10. Please don't be fooled by the "9.3" score it currently has. You can thank the cast and crew of the movie which are obviously rating their movie on IMDb. The only reason this movie gets a 4, is because of that cute girl that came out in that horrible movie "My daughter's secret."

I am being generous by giving this movie a 4 out of 10. Please don't be fooled by the "9.3" score it currently has. You can thank the cast and crew of the movie which are obviously rating their movie on IMDb. The only reason this movie gets a 4, is because of that cute girl that came out in that horrible movie "My daughter's secret."

I found this movie on DVD at Blockbuster under the above title. I was very disappointed. It was unrealistic and the plot full of holes. The German accents were almost annoying and even hard to understand. The only redeeming quality of this movie was Roy Scheider as the rabbi. At least he seemed believable. Whoever came up with the script should have watched a good Holocaust movie like Schindler's List first before subjecting the public to this mediocre stuff. Darryl Hannah talents were wasted in this film, plus she didn't seem old enough to have a grown (twenty-something) son. Forget about watching The Poet, aka Hearts of War!!!

I thought I'd seen WWII done in just about every possible way, but this is the first time I've seen a movie involving German soldiers traipsing through the Polish/Russian countryside gathering information on partisan cells. If only it were done better, and without the ridiculous plot, I'd have been very interested, but it went wrong almost from the start. Terrible screenplay, horrible weird accents, silly love triangle plot etc & etc. While watching it I didn't realize the small part of the rabbi was played by Roy Scheider, who I thought had died before this movie was made, and it amazed me that the actor was so much like that great actor, and at how well the part was being played in such an otherwise poorly acted movie. I caught Scheider's name on the closing credits. A pity such a fine performance was wasted in such a poor movie. Saw this under the DVD title 'Hearts of War.' Thankfully I bought it for a dollar.

After reading some of the bad feedback from other reviews, I decided to watch it anyway. Unfortunately, they were all spot on. Its rather a shame too, as the it 'looked' quite authentic with some decent effort made towards costume and setting. Even the cinematography was at a decent standard.

However, everything else was pretty bad, terrible even. The main thing that let it down was the bad script which led to some appalling dialogue and acting at times. Some scenes are laughable its that bad. The funniest scene been at 43 minutes when a boom mic appears in shot for about 10 seconds.

I've given it a 3 simply for the mise en scene.

Films about WWII are countless and specially those who focus on brutality and murder of Jews. (Anyway it will always be difficult to match "Schindler's List").But, including all of them, this is the worst that I've ever seen. The screenplay is just awful and the whole story is not to be believed. The main characters engage in a romance that is not love at first sight but at an eye blink. If this would not be enough, the romantic pair is played by amateur actors. I wonder what Roy Scheider is doing in a film like this, although he shows a good performance in a small part, almost a cameo. The same applies to Darryl Hannah. There is a cabaret scene in the film that is simply disrespectful to those Jews who endured persecution and mass assassination.